The Phenomena of Memory:
Memory is our mid store house, the reservoir of our accumulated learning. According to Cicero “memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.” From Psychologist point of view
Memory is any indication that learning has persistent over time. It is our ability to store and retrieve information. (Myers, 2005 pg 257).
The capacity for remembering countless voices, sounds and songs; taste, smell and textures: faces places and happenings is staggering in itself. According to Ralph Haber (1970) Imagine viewing more than 2500 slides of faces and places, for only 10 seconds each. If we see 280 of these slides one at a time for 10 seconds we can only remember ten percent and the remaining ninety percent will be forgotten. (257)
How We
Encode Information:
Our memory is in some ways like a computers
processing system to remember any event requires that we get information into our brain. It depends upon three sequential processes: encoding, Storage and retrieval. Consider how a computer encodes, stores, and retrieve information. First it translates inputs into an electronic language, much as the
brain encodes
sensory information into a neural language. The computer permanently stores vast amount of information on a disk, from which it can latter be retrieved. Our memories are less little literal and more fragile than a computers.
Three-Stage Processing Model of Memory:
According to Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin’s proposed a three-stage processing model of memory (1968), which includes Sensory memory. Short term memory and long term memory. We first record to be remembered information as a fleeting sensory memory, from which it is processed into a short term memory bin, where we encode it for long term memory and later retrieval.
The new concept of working memory clarifies the short term memory concept by focusing more on our behind the scene information processing. Like short term, memory working memory is quite limited. According to Allan Baddeley (1992)
notes that working memory has a visual and a verbal component.
Some types of information, notably information concerning space, time, and frequency, we encode mostly automatically. Automatic processing is unconscious
encoding of incidental information. Other types of information, including much of our processing of meaning, imagery, and organization, require conscious effort and attention and are termed as effortful processing. We can boost our memory through rehearsal or conscious repetition. Rehearsal is the conscious repetition of information, either to maintain it in consciousness or to encode it for storage.
Fergus Craik and Endel Tulving (1975) performed an experiment and on the basis of such experiment they concluded that semantic encoding: the encoding of meaning, including the meaning of words, is much more important than acoustic: the encoding of sound especially the sound of words and visual encoding: the encoding of picture images. (pg 262,263)
When in a class we heard a paragraph without a meaningful context we remember little of it and when something additionally meaningful is added in it and specifies the topic, we remember more of it.
According to Ebbinghaus when compared with learning non sense material, learning meaningful material required only one tenth of effort. (pg 263)
According to the levels of processing the kinds of memory coded people create depends upon which aspect of the stimulus is emphasized. As mentioned earlier there are three types of memory : Sensory, STM, LTM. The sensory memory preserves information in its original sensory form for a brief time usually for a fraction of a second while the STM is a limited capacity store that can maintain an unrehearsed information for up to about 20 sec . In contrast information stored in LTM may last for weeks, months and years.
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